Many organizations use a data warehouse to store their business related data based on their various data source systems within the organization. In order to obtain desired information from the data warehouse, many organization use business intelligence tools. Business Intelligence tools expose a business view of available information by means of reports, and allow people to select information and format reports. Most business intelligence reports are custom written. It is often time consuming to write reports. Writing reports requires special knowledge of the business intelligence tools and underlying data stores.
In order to reduce the number of custom written reports, many packaged analytic applications provide predefined reports to view data pertaining to common transaction processing systems. Those predefined reports are often inflexible to meet diverse needs of various business users.
With existing business intelligence tool, it is often difficult to get the right information to the right people at the right time. It is desirable to provide a mechanism that provides predefined reports that can be easily configured to meet the diverse requirements of various users.